Posts Tagged ‘UK news’
Premier League clamps down on web pirates illegally broadcasting matches
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on September 19th, 2009
Illegal streaming of Premier League football matches threatens broadcast deals worth £1bn a year
A website that illegally streams live television to personal computers and shows English football games each week could be closed down by the Premier League.
The success of MyP2P.eu, which is registered in the Netherlands, illustrates the problems that sports bodies face as they struggle to protect lucrative deals with broadcasters at a time when broadband access is making it easier to watch television programmes illegally.
A host of recent Premier League matches have been shown on the site. MyP2P will also screen Manchester United's Carling Cup tie against Wolverhampton Wanderers on Wednesday. It showed the England cricket team's one-day international matches with Australia last week, along with hundreds of other sporting events, including American football games, rugby and Formula One.
The site uses "peer-to-peer" technology, effectively acting as a conduit for users who want to share content over the internet. Emails sent by the Observer to the site administrator were not answered.
The Premier League makes about £1bn a year from selling the rights to screen its games. Revenues from overseas rights more than doubled to £625m when they were last sold off, but they have been renewed on a staggered basis and that sum is expected to be exceeded this year. The current arrangement includes 81 deals covering 211 territories.
Technological advances mean it is now easy for viewers abroad to make games available online. The Premier League has a policy of not showing any live matches at 3pm on a Saturday, but that rule does not apply to foreign broadcasters. Media industry figures point out that this creates an opportunity for pirates, who act to meet a demand from British audiences for games that cannot otherwise be seen.
Simon Denyer, chief executive of Perform, which works with rights owners to create highlights packages that are shown on dozens of legal websites, including those run by major newspaper groups, said piracy is a growing problem. "If you don't allow someone to watch [games] from an official source, then the pirates do it for you. The biggest problem is the 3pm Premier League kick-offs," he said.
Denyer added that the vast majority of illegally available games were "very low quality, with strange commentary and graphics".
The number of pirated games is likely to grow because broadband take-up in the UK is high and growing. According to the media regulator, Ofcom, 65% of UK homes had a fixed broadband connection in the first quarter of 2009, up from 41% in 2006. Cable companies, including Virgin Media and the telecommunications giant BT, are also offering customers "superfast" broadband packages that enable users to download moving images quickly. Previously, it could take hours to download films or TV shows, but that can now be done in minutes.
The film and TV industries are also suffering as more consumers experiment with illegally acquiring online content, and have been lobbying the government to take action. Lord Mandelson, the business secretary, pledged last month to crack down on the problem, but internet service providers have been engaged in a fierce row with content owners over who should bear the cost.
File-sharing music sites, including LimeWire and Napster, use the same peer-to-peer method, encouraging subscribers to make songs available to fellow users free of charge. Napster began as an illegal site but now operates within the law. The music industry claims illegal file-sharing sites have cost it up to £18m a year in lost revenue.
The Premier League said 1,800 cases of illegal streaming were dealt with last season, more than 90% of them successfully. It employs a company called NetResult to protect its intellectual property and either remove web content or shut down websites that are illegally streaming games.
The league is also embroiled, along with several other companies in the music and film industries, in a long-running legal battle with YouTube, which it accuses of illegally showing Premier League games. It is suing the video-sharing site, which is owned by internet giant Google, in a New York court.
Find your nearest postbox – legally
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on September 16th, 2009
A Freedom of Information request has led to a very useful website showing where postboxes are located
One of the winners of the Cabinet Office's Show Us a Better Way competition – held last year to find ways of using government-owned data – is getting into its stride, after Royal Mail was forced to release the location details of its 116,000 postboxes by the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act.
The idea of finding out where your nearest postbox is – put forward by Jenny Ingram – was one of six winners. But creating a map of those postboxes had to be put on hold almost immediately when Royal Mail expressed reservations about providing its data to an outside party.
But following a series of FoI requests, the details not only of the postcodes of the postboxes but also their collection times has been gathered. The crowdsourcing effort (which readers are encouraged to help with) aims to pinpoint every postbox in the UK on an openly licensed map so it can be provided on future mobile platforms without licensing concerns.
The scheme, being run by Matthew Somerville, a web developer, at http://www.dracos.co.uk/play/locating-postboxes/ builds on the complete set of postboxes released under an FoI request in August. Other requests have also gathered collection times.
Royal Mail has insisted it retains all rights in the information released through the request – which would include precise locations of the postboxes. But Somerville has got around that by using the open-sourced OpenStreetMap system, and asking viewers to click a spot that they think is closest to a named, postcoded postbox.
Does that infringe the Royal Mail's rights? "I don't think locations of postboxes are being derived from the list, regardless of what the IP [intellectual property] status of the list itself might be." Somerville said. "I would hope that they would consider what I have done/ am doing worthwhile and a public service. They could even use the accurate locations themselves to run things such as travelling salesman algorithms to work out better routes to collect from the postboxes!"
So far 22,747 have been located out of about 116,000 in total. And how long could it take to finish? "No idea," says Somerville. "People can really only do the ones around them unless they're travelling, so it's really up to getting people all over the place."
It's a wonderfully useful idea – though the fact that it required multiple FoI requests and still has faint legal uncertainty shows that the government urgently needs to stop looking at its non-personal data as requiring protection – and start allowing the public to create new products with it.
Join the debate at the Free Our Data blog
Ofcom allows BT’s cheaper phone, TV and broadband
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on September 15th, 2009
Telecoms watchdog lifts restrictions on BT bundling services at discounted rates
BT's 14 million landline customers could see their telephone, broadband and pay-TV bills reduced after a watchdog's ruling paved the way for more competition between telecoms companies.
Ofcom has lifted restrictions placed on BT when it was privatised in the mid-1980s which prevented it from bundling together services such as broadband and a landline in a discount package.
The change means that BT will be able to introduce new packages this autumn, joining a bundling trend that its rivals have been driving for years.
BT enjoyed a 4.4% jump in its share price to 135.5p on the news – making it the biggest riser on the FTSE100 index.
BT's competitors, such as Virgin Media and BSkyB, have been able to package together two or more services and sell the bundle for less than the services would cost individually. Previously, because of rules designed to stop the former telecoms monopoly busing a dominant position in the landline market, BT has been able to sell such packages only for a price equal to the sum of the parts.
But Ofcom now believes competition is healthy and BT no longer has "significant market power" in the majority of retail landline markets. The regulator says more than 12m UK households and small businesses use a telecoms provider other than BT, so it is safe to remove one of the last pieces of regulation in the fixed-line market.
"This is an important step in deregulating telecoms, where competition can be relied upon to serve the consumer interest," said Ofcom's chief executive, Ed Richards.
BT Retail's chief executive, Gavin Patterson, said: "It means that BT will be competing on a more level playing field than previously.
It's good news for consumers and businesses, as this will allow BT to offer more targeted discounts on products and services, and more attractive bundles at better prices – something we have been unable to offer widely to date."
Ofcom's decision also means the company will no longer have to inform competitors in advance on its prices.
For customers, it means that when any of their BT contracts come up for renewal they can choose from a wider range of packages.
By fostering greater competition between telecoms providers, Ofcom's decision is also likely to cut prices throughout the market. "We think there might be a bit of a battle of the bundles here, because customers are very interested these days in taking a package," said a BT source.
According to Ofcom's latest figures, in 2008 nearly half (46%) of UK consumers bought a bundle of communication services, up from 29% in 2005. While bundles have increased, calls have become cheaper. The cost of residential calls from a landline has fallen to £21.57 a month in 2008 from £25.04 in 2003.
PM apologises for Alan Turing treatment
Posted by: Caroline Davies in Technology on September 13th, 2009
• Enigma genius chemically castrated for being gay
• Admission comes 55 years after Turing took his life
Gordon Brown issued an unequivocal apology last night on behalf of the government to Alan Turing, the second world war codebreaker who took his own life 55 years ago after being sentenced to chemical castration for being gay.
Describing Turing's treatment as "horrifying" and "utterly unfair", Brown said the country owed the brilliant mathematician a huge debt. He was proud, he said, to offer an official apology. "We're sorry, you deserved so much better," Brown writes in a statement posted on the No 10 website.
Turing is most famous for his work in helping create the "bombe" that cracked messages enciphered with the German Enigma machines. He was convicted of gross indecency in 1952 after admitting a sexual relationship with a man.
He was given experimental chemical castration as a "treatment". His criminal record meant he was unable to continue his work for the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) because his security privileges were withdrawn. Two years later he killed himself, aged 41.
Thousands have signed a Downing Street petition calling for an official apology, among them the novelist Ian McEwan, scientist Richard Dawkins, and gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell.
Paying tribute to Turing's contribution to "Britain's fight against the darkness of dictatorship", Brown described him as "a quite brilliant mathematician".
"Without his outstanding contribution, the history of world war two could well have been very different," he writes.
"The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of gross indecency – in effect, tried for being gay.
"His sentence – and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison – was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones."
The petition, which yesterday had 30,805 signatures, was the idea of computer scientist John Graham-Cumming, who has also written to the Queen to request Turing be awarded a posthumous knighthood. Although an official apology is unusual, the act is seen as symbolic. Alan Turing is survived by three neices – Inagh, Shuna and Janet, from his brother's first marriage – and a nephew, John Dermot Turing, from his brother's second marriage, along with their associated family members.
Acknowledging the strength of feeling, Brown wrote: "Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can't put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him.
"Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of conviction.
"This recognition of Alan's status as one of Britain's most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality and long overdue."
"But even more than that, Alan deserves recognition for his contribution to humankind … It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe's history and not Europe's present.
"So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan's work I am very proud to say: we're sorry, you deserved so much better."
Though most famous for his codebreaking, Turing is often considered to be the father of modern computer science, having made highly significant contributions to the emerging field of artificial intelligence and computing. After the war he worked at many institutions, including the University of Manchester, where he worked on the Manchester mark 1, one of the first recognisable modern computers.
In 1999 Time Magazine named him as one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century.
• This article was amended on 13 September 2009 to name the main surviving blood relations of Alan Turing, omitted from the original version of this article.
McKinnon seeks Supreme Court appeal
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on September 13th, 2009
Gary McKinnon, the computer hacker with Asperger's syndrome who broke into the Pentagon's computer systems in his search for proof of UFOs, is likely to discover this week whether his appeal against extradition to the US will be heard by the UK's highest court.
His legal team claim the new supreme court of England and Wales must hear the appeal under the European convention on human rights. They argue that because the court has agreed to hear an appeal against extradition to the US brought by Ian Norris, a businessman who has prostate cancer, that ruling should apply to their client.
The civil rights group Liberty, which supports McKinnon (pictured below), said there may be "compelling personal reasons why a defendant should not be sent abroad for trial".
Janis McKinnon, Gary's mother, said her son was suffering from depression and friends were concerned he may be suicidal.
Filesharing crackdown divides industry
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on September 12th, 2009
Coalition of artists says moves to suspend offenders' broadband connections are like 'cracking a nut with a sledgehammer'
A growing rift is developing in the music industry over proposals by business secretary Lord Mandelson to crack down on persistent filesharers by suspending their broadband connections.
The row has pitted big names such as Billy Bragg and Annie Lennox against record labels and the Musicians' Union ahead of an approaching government deadline for comments in its illegal filesharing consultation.
A coalition of artists including Lennox, Bragg and Pink Floyd's Nick Mason argue such laws would alienate their audience and risk criminalising music fans. The Featured Artists Coalition (FAC) says the planned crackdown fails to recognise "evidence that repeat file-sharers of music are also repeat purchasers of music".
But music industry figures have hit back that it is too easy for established, high-earning artists to take this view and that the big stars are neglecting the low-earning session musicians and lesser-known bands. Some fear divisions in the industry could derail their anti-piracy fight when new laws are close.
Fran Nevrkla, head of the royalty collection society PPL, says the FAC's claims are "grossly naive and desperately damaging".
"All of us look like a bunch of charlies," he says. "This is more than unhelpful. It's destructive, I wish I could understand the hostility. But if between us all we don't screw it up, within 12 months we could have some legislation in place. I am quietly confident."
Nevrkla stresses that 90% of PPL's 42,000 members earn less than £15,000 a year from music and that the FAC has neglected the low earners. "We don't understand why they feel they have the right to imply they speak on behalf of all artists and musicians. Their views are not shared by the majority."
Dave Rowntree, an FAC board member and the drummer in Blur, says Mandelson's proposals are akin to trying to "crack a nut with a sledgehammer" .
"For the industry as a whole, the more people hear music the better," says Rowntree. "For a so-called creative industry we are being very uncreative in the way we approach this topic."
He adds: "We have driven the problem underground and we are about to drive it into a place where we won't be able to find out what is going on.
"Given that we have managed to monetise the playing of music in all other ways in the music industry, it's not beyond the greatest creative minds on the planet to monetise this one too."
The Musicians' Union concedes that its members have a range of views on filesharing. General secretary John Smith says he has sympathy for the FAC's attitude but thinks its campaign "a bit blinkered" and "counterproductive".
"I am disappointed they went maverick without looking at the bigger picture," he says. "Our position is somebody should be paid for their creation."
The labels and many artist managers argue that piracy has hurt new artists. James Sandom, whose SuperVision Management company manages Kaiser Chiefs and newer acts such as White Lies, says artists need initial investment before they can live off touring and other non-sales revenues. "Fewer new artists are getting signed and finding investors to give them a foothold," he says.
His artists have direct experience of piracy. "Kaiser Chiefs' chief songwriter Nick Hodgson, when the last album was leaked onto the web a month before release, said it was like having his house burgled and someone was using the internet to sell all his belongings."
Artist manager Paul Loasby, whose clients include Jools Holland and Pink Floyd's David Gilmour, argues artists need to be given the upper hand.
"If an artist wants to give away their music, that's up to them. It shouldn't be up to pirates," he says. "A download costs 79p. Could you name me something that you could buy that would last you forever and give you pleasure for 79p? This is not a lot for people to ask for."
Beatles fans fuss as Rock Band arrives
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Games, Technology on September 9th, 2009
A time traveller from the 1960s might have been forgiven for thinking nothing new had happened in youth culture in 40 years if they had visited London's Oxford Street today. The HMV store was covered in Beatles posters with a queue of young people waiting patiently outside to spend money on Fab Four merchandise.
There was plenty on offer: the band's consistently lucrative back catalogue was repackaged yet again, with the simultaneous release of the first video game endorsed by the band and remastered CDs.
Most of the fuss is about a Beatles edition of Rock Band, the interactive computer game which allows people to strap on a scaled-down guitar or bass and follow on-screen cues to "play" one of 45 Beatles songs as they sing along. Would-be Ringo Starrs can hit a tiny drum kit.
It is certain to become a bestseller, despite a price tag which can reach more than £350 with the optional extras – plastic facsimiles of instruments such as Paul McCartney's Hofner bass and John Lennon's Rickenbacker guitar.
The reissue of the band's albums, in separate cleaned-up stereo and mono versions, is the first major repackaging since the Anthology series was launched in 1995. They have been rapturously received by critics who say new life has been breathed into some classic songs.
Today the stereo box set, priced at £170, was topping the Amazon UK music charts, with the £200 mono edition not far behind. Bookmakers expect one of the individual CDs, probably Revolver, to top the official album charts this week.
It is a global phenomenon – Beatles CDs occupied five of the top six spots on the US Amazon album chart.
First in the queue at HMV – just down the road from the original HMV where, in 1962, the band's manager Brian Epstein brought Beatles demo tapes to be pressed on to vinyl – was a 59-year-old self-described Beatles obsessive and collector, Alan Harrington, but almost everyone else had been born after the Beatles split in 1970.
Mark Wardle, 35, from Ealing, west London, attempted to explain the appeal: "This is an official Beatles game. You get to play guitar with Paul or John or George. It's like: Wow, the band I've loved all my life and I get to play along with them. It's Ringo playing the drums! It's brilliant!"
Medics suspended over Facebook antics
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on September 9th, 2009
Doctors and nurses at Swindon's Great Western hospital face disciplinary hearings after photographs posted on internet
Staff at a hospital in Swindon, including doctors, have been suspended for allegedly taking part in an internet craze known as the "lying down game" while on duty, an NHS trust said today.
Seven staff remain suspended on full pay after the alleged incident, which is said to have taken place during a night shift on August 14-15.
Doctors and nurses from the Great Western hospital's accident and emergency department and acute assessment unit photographed each other lying face down on resuscitation trolleys, ward floors and on the Wiltshire air ambulance helipad.
The pictures were then posted on social networking site Facebook, where hospital management spotted them. They have now been taken down.
The game involves lying face down with palms flat against the body and toes pointing at the ground.
Alf Troughton, medical director of Great Western Hospital NHS Trust, said disciplinary hearings would be held.
"A number of staff were suspended following allegations of unprofessional conduct while on night shift duty in the hospital during a weekend in August," he said.
"This did not involve patients and we are satisfied that at no time was patient care compromised.
"The Great Western Hospital sets high standards for staff behaviour at all times and therefore takes any such breaches extremely seriously.
"It is important to reassure patients and our workforce that this was an isolated incident and staff cover was maintained at all times."
Anti-piracy campaign aimed at net users
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on September 6th, 2009
• More positive message adopted to curb filesharing
• Ads unveiled as ministers prepare anti-piracy bill
After decades of heavy-handed messages warning that watching pirated films and TV shows is a criminal offence, a new anti-piracy campaign aims to win over the "Generation Y-pay?" of internet users by reminding them that legal downloading supports their favourite actors and programmes.
The campaign, which comes as the government looks to push through measures to crack down on illegal downloaders, is being supported by celebrities including Dominic West, star of The Wire, former EastEnders actor Tamzin Outhwaite and Strictly Come Dancing's Matt Di Angelo.
The campaign will replace the "Piracy is a crime" trailers at the start of millions of DVDs rented or sold each year that likened the activity to stealing a car, handbag or TV set and threatened jail or imprisonment.
Such trailers will be phased out in favour of a quirky animation that ends with a giant "Thank You" logo. In November, a new series of trailers, pushing the positive message "You Make the Movies", will appear in cinemas across the UK before the main feature presentation.
The new approach, unveiled today, fronted by Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels star Nick Moran, is born out of research that shows the film and TV industry needs to offer some "carrot" to go with the "stick" to change the attitude of the web generation. The Industry Trust for IP Awareness (Itipa) says the problem is that 16-to-34-year-olds, the so-called Generation Y, has an attitude to online content that it sums up as "Generation Y-pay?"
A survey has shown that while 74% of 16-to-34-year-olds agree that paying to rent or see films in daily life is right and proper, just 39% think they should pay for the same content when they are viewing the content on the internet.
The campaign appeals to young people by promoting the idea that making positive, legal choices ensures their favourite shows and actors stay on screen.
"With the digital revolution set to open up access to more unauthorised film and TV content, it is going to be more important than ever for people to understand the positive connection they have to the British creative industries, such as film and TV," said Liz Bales, the director general of the Itipa. "Our industry must share responsibility for showing the public the positive role they play.
"Film and TV is the industry that we as a nation are most proud of, the challenge is that Generation Y-pay underestimates how vital they are to funding future films and TV shows. They don't realise that without them [buying legal products] great British film and TV couldn't get made," Bales added.
The campaign, called Connected to British Film and TV, includes a week of advertorials in the Sun newspaper and a website to get film and TV fans to pledge their support and find out what industry activity is happening in their local area.
The timing of the campaign follows the business secretary Lord Mandelson's announcement of new laws to cut off, or at least significantly slow, the internet connections of those who are found to be illegally filesharing.
The proposals, revealed last month, had previously been rejected as a step too far in Lord Carter's Digital Britain report in June.
The government aims to cut illegal filesharing by 70% to 80% in the next few years, with the solution offered by Carter, who has since left the government, only going as far as recommending that pirates should receive letters warning them their activities were illegal and could leave them open to prosecution.
"I want to be clear this isn't a knee-jerk reaction, a flash in the pan ad campaign following what [Peter] Mandelson has said," Bales said. "We have had a significant, long-running campaign and this is the latest stage in that."
Late last week, David Lammy, the intellectual property minister, reminded the entertainment industry that the government expected its actions to be counterbalanced by such campaigns.
Speaking to the Motion Picture Association of America in Washington, Lammy told the audience: "Many otherwise law-abiding people believe they are causing no harm when they buy or download illegal copyright goods. They think that creators and business have already been well paid for their work. I want us to reach out to those people."
The government's proposals are being hammered into shape in the form of a digital economy bill, which is intended to be officially unveiled during the Queen's Speech in mid-November.
However, the controversial nature of some proposals, particularly ahead of next year's general election, and the lack of parliamentary time, have led some to question how much of the bill will make it through parliament.
Labels eye filesharing law ‘by next year’
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on September 6th, 2009
The proposed legislation from Peter Mandelson has provoked a fierce debate, with support from record labels but opposition from musicians and ISP providers
Proposals to suspend the internet connections of people who persist in illegally swapping copyrighted films and music could become law within less than a year despite the fierce debate they have sparked, according to Britain's record label lobby group.
The labels, who have long campaigned for tougher action as they struggle with dwindling sales and rampant piracy, also claim there is widespread public support for a government clampdown on filesharers.
Industry group BPI, which represents the four big labels and independent music companies, believes the latest proposals from business secretary Peter Mandelson will significantly change consumer behaviour online and marginalise piracy within years.
"Assuming there is an election in May, then we believe the bill will be in the Queen's speech and that it should go through. It's got the full support of government and we believe the opposition will support it," said BPI chief executive Geoff Taylor.
"There will always be people who seek to work around the system. But the average consumer who pays for their jeans, pays for their car, we believe will be brought back into the legal market."
The recently-revealed decision to consider cutting off peer-to-peer filesharers was unexpected since it was ruled out by the government's own Digital Britain report in June.
Taylor welcomes the rethink.
"Government realised that if you look at a problem of this scale, the measures it was putting forward were not going to be big enough," he said.
"Politicians are beginning to see that the creative industries are absolutely central for the future of the country's economy and that it's an area where we excel."
There has been angry reaction to the proposed law, under which illegal filesharers would get warning letters, but if they continue to swap copyrighted material they could have their internet connection temporarily severed.
An alliance of musicians, songwriters and producers attacked the proposals as expensive, illogical and "extraordinarily negative".
BT chief executive Ian Livingstone, Charles Dunstone of Carphone Warehouse, which owns TalkTalk, and others joined to condemn the plans as threatening broadband consumers' rights and the development of new services because of the money such a clampdown would drain from the industry.
But Taylor argues some internet service providers (ISPs) have "sought to misportray what the proposals involve."
"No one has been proposing criminalising anyone. Government is not talking about disconnecting anyone, the debate is around temporary suspension of internet connections as a last resort," he says.
BPI has completed new research, which it says highlights public support for tougher laws.
Almost three out of five non-filesharers it surveyed believe the government should take stronger action to ensure people do not illegally fileshare. Even a third of filesharers agree with that statement, Taylor says.
Among filesharers, 43% agreed ISPs should make it harder to illegally swap music and more than half agreed filesharing is "wrong, but doesn't hurt anybody".
More than 90% of non-filesharers pay for music because they believe it is fair artists are paid for their work, according to the survey of 4,017 non-filesharers and 1,201 music filesharers conducted earlier this year by Harris Interactive on behalf of BPI.
Digital rights groups predict the public will not be so accepting of the latest proposals.
Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, has cited opposition to similar proposals in France and said: "The result of these proposals is likely to be protest, challenges and public arguments in the run-up to the general election."
A key sticking point will be the question of who pays to enforce any new law.
A spokesman for BSkyB, whose own music service is rumoured to be launching in coming months, said the latest proposals may "both jeopardise investment in new services and increase overall costs for consumers."
John Petter, managing director of BT's consumer division said: "We believe the creative industries need to play a larger role in tackling copyright infringement and so we will be making our views known to the government."
Taylor argues rights holders already bear the costs of piracy through the damage to their industry.
"ISPs are not being asked to police the internet. It is rights holders who identify web addresses being used illegally," he says.
"Once the ISP knows that their service – for which they are taking money – is being used illegally, they have a responsibility to do something about it."
